Attention Machines and Future Politics Highlight

Small language models — I mean extremely small, 800 million parameters — can be embedded anywhere, even toothbrushes, thermostats, in order to both serve as a command interface (“turn on!”) and also to simulate the surface effects of personhood and thereby, having trapped you in just 3 extra seconds of dialogue, scrape the bottom bits of engagement and extractable data from your day.

If things do develop in this direction, it would be exhausting, strange, maybe catastrophic for our sense of what a person is. We would interact with them as if they were persons, and over time, invariably, this would cause us to expect less from relationality as such: less memory, less accountability, less truth. This would amount to something like a systemic discrediting of the signs of personhood — a diminishment of personhood as such